Letting It Percolate | The Future of The Better Reader

Literary Escapism and the Seasons of (My) Creativity

If you’ve ever used a percolator over a camp stove, you know it takes closer to 30 minutes to make a pot of coffee in the woods than the 7-10 recommended by a quick Google search. After 7 minutes, you may have something that looks like coffee—but it will taste like hot brown water. Wait those 23 extra minutes, though, and you’ll achieve camp coffee that both looks and tastes like it.

The Better Reader has been percolating this year. I’m eager for it to become a rich, steaming, full-bodied thing. Looks like it’s gonna take the full 30 minutes.

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This newsletter contains two announcements, and a reflection on the way creativity shifts with the seasons. It’s also an ode to the books that had carried me along when the Life of the Mind isn’t exactly the life than I’m living right now.

Let’s start with an announcement:

Announcement #1: The Better Reader is having a baby!

Literally! And any day now. Merry Christmas to the Andrews family! This accounts for the quiet of the last few months; it turns out that being pregnant, for me, really saps the energy that I had been using to read and, especially, to write.

Which brings us to…

…a reflection on creativity, individuality, and (not) being an academic.

I don’t think I’m a true academic. I admire you when I meet you, you intellectual giants, you people driven to think and read and write and ponder. You philosophizers and deep thinkers. You who wrestle with God and existence and the meaning of life. You who can’t seem to help but do so. Many of you are my dear friends.

When I begin to think along these lines, I always think of the poet and writer Christian Wiman, who while suffering from cancer (and its treatments) wrote the profound book My Bright Abyss. It is stunning to me that he wrote this while undergoing treatment. It is stunning to me that he wrote this about the experience of suffering, about the imminence of death. The complete absence of escapism here boggles my mind and makes me certain of nothing more than how different we humans can be from one another. I, too, have had cancer, have been through a crucible of treatment. I did not write about suffering and death. I didn’t read the copy of My Bright Abyss that a well-meaning acquaintance (a professor and academic, incidentally) gave me. I reread all of Harry Potter.

This behavior has remained consistent in the other large and small sufferings of my life.

In the year after my first child was born, I read all the books in Alan Bradley’s wonderful Flavia de Luce Mysteries. (There were ten at the time—now there are eleven!) When I graduated from college with my English degree, a bit burnt out from reading so many hundreds of pages of classics on a near-daily basis for the last many years, I read a bunch of science-y nonfiction books (The Soul of an Octopus, On Trails, Braiding Sweetgrass, American Wolf). This year, pregnant with my third child, I binge-read Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike novels, covering literally thousands of pages in a matter of days, and doing little else—certainly not writing about the profundity of motherhood or, indeed, writing about anything.

I am slowly coming to the conclusion that this is okay. That I can be a writer and a thoughtful person and even a literary scholar and also not participate in that side of myself as fully during seasons of (especially physical) stress. Do you know what I’ve been doing this pregnancy (besides reading crime fiction)? I’ve been sewing like a crazy person. I finished my daughter’s big-girl quilt. I made an advent calendar—made it up in my brain and produced it in wool felt and hung it on my wall. I planned a Christmas pageant for our church and made a bunch of sheep costumes. Creativity has not deserted me; it has just morphed into something different. Something much more physical. Something I can touch.

How fitting, really, for a season in which I have grown an actual child within my body. Not to mention a season soaked in the miracle of birth each year—the advent of Christ, God’s word made flesh, the intangible made tangible.

I am grateful for Substack and this newsletter, grateful that two years out from my daughter’s birth I looked up and said, “Hey! I am a writer! I should write!” I am more myself having remembered that this is true. The certainty that I will write again, and soon, fills me with peace. After all, The Better Reader was never dead. It was always only percolating.

Announcement #2: The Better Reader is getting a make-over.

When I started this newsletter, my aim was to post once weekly, roughly alternating between writing about children’s fiction, “grown-up” literature, and how to read fiction generally. Along the way, I discovered that once weekly works great for shorter pieces, writing about picture books, creating book lists, etc., but that what I really enjoy writing is longer essays—you know, the kind with a thesis and an argument and plenty of literary analysis. Also, the kind that requires reading or rereading at least one and often several full-length novels.¹ To my surprise, it also seems that people enjoy reading this writing when I make the time to produce it: I know many of you are here because you read and enjoyed what I considered a ridiculously niche article on Piranesi and C.S. Lewis.²

So in the new year, when the baby is here and the hormones have settled and spring is in the air, The Better Reader will be back. I’ll be aiming for once monthly newsletters this time, which will allow space to be a bit more ambitious in scope: to write a bit longer, to read a bit more, and to produce the kind of well-structured, thesis-driven writing that brings me the most joy. I think it’s also the kind of writing that I’m best at; and I’m trying to be who I am. Thanks for being here, for letting it percolate. I hope you stick around.

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1. For instance, one of my drafts is titled “On the Hit-or-Miss Endings of Kazuo Ishiguro, A Genius,” which unfortunately entails rereading…all of Ishiguro. All the way to the endings. Lol.

2. In retrospect, this was less niche than I thought—I underestimated both how many people read Piranesi and how robust C.S. Lewis’s fandom has remained. ;) Sometimes you have to take to the internet to find your people.